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Sueann Caulfield: When a call for proposals for a big high profile international visit
by Mary Sue Coleman came, we responded to that by putting a proposal together that emphasized
the longstanding collaborations in both of our areas; the social sciences broadly and
the medical sciences broadly.
Michelle Heisler: It just made sense that we bring together these lines of work and
suggest that the President and the delegation go to Brazil.
As the Medical School has been really thinking about developing bilateral synergistic partnerships
over the last years, how can we develop a platform where we are bringing Brazilian students,
residents, faculty, here to benefit from training and another opportunities and that we are
bringing more Michigan students, residents, faculty to Brazil?
So some of the longer standing collaborations have been with some of our clinical and basic
science researchers. A good example is that the University of Michigan has one of the
main centers for treating and trying to understand adrenal cancer. The University of São Paulo
is also a leading center for trying to understand adrenal cancer.
With the two institutions working together, they have been able to get enough patients,
they have been able to gather data, they have been able to work together on research and
are really making important strides in understanding what causes this very fatal cancer.
Sueann Caulfield: One of our primary objectives is to draw attention to the relationships
that are longstanding and vibrant between U-M researchers and Brazilian researchers.
Then secondly, we want to -- we are hoping that the visit by President Coleman will,
by drawing attention to those collaborations, will encourage collaborators to continuing
to expand the collaboration that they are doing, the work that they are doing.
And then thirdly, we hope to identify areas of potential collaboration that we are presently
unaware of.
I will be in touch with historians at the State University, UNICAMP, for example, and
I will ask them, oh, I have a colleague who works in natural resources, do you have colleagues
that are -- and they not only have colleagues, they have a whole center for the study sustainability
and then they got in touch with each other and there is a lot of, sort of, excitement.
Michelle Heisler: I think it's really a wonderful case of synergy, that there are things that
we can offer them, but there is a lot that we can learn from Brazil.